Le Grand Aioli Brings Everyone to the Table

Gentl and Hyers for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Glen Proebstel.

September 6, 2017

Eat

By GABRIELLE HAMILTON

Some could see it as ill timed that just as you are giving the porch a final sweep and nailing shut the screen doors of summer, this perfect, languid, lavish alfresco meal — the kind pitched in food magazines back in June — pulls up the driveway, windows down, honking its horn. You might frown: Summer’s over, you loon. Back to work! Back to school!

But le grand aioli — nothing more than well-boiled vegetables and some simply steamed fish, with bowls of bracing garlic mayonnaise for dipping — is, to me, less of a latecomer’s grab at the last days of summer than it is an invigorated celebration of the return to the Village, a meal for reuniting with all the people who have been floating around somewhere barefoot all summer, their cars never parked in their driveways.

Let’s roll it out, then, tan, rested people! This leisurely meal — a dearly respected communal eating tradition in Provence — is organized around the sauce, the aioli itself, to coincide with the recent harvest of the year’s garlic. But after that, its components are loosely governed. It’s a better way to unload the haul from the garden — herself now fecund and prolific, the magnificent yield weighting down the vines and swollen under the leaves — than side-tossing your overwhelming motherlode of zucchini into the back seats of parked cars whose unsuspecting owners have left the windows rolled down. It can all be used here: lettuces, beets, radishes, carrots, beans, tomatoes, every bit of that zucchini. But it can also be spare; the incomparable French chef Daniel Boulud told me of a ‘‘killer’’ monochromatic one comprising just cod, cauliflower and potatoes.

Gentl and Hyers for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Glen Proebstel.

While it is as easygoing as a meal can get — to source, to cook, to serve, to eat, to clean up after, to satisfy omnivores and vegetarians equally — it is, however, one for which a few solid and eternally binding rules of good cooking make a big difference: Cook your vegetables properly, ‘‘à point.’’ While this is the term meant to signify just under medium-rare when you are ordering a steak in France (at the point that the blood starts to run), I find it useful to describe the desired doneness of cooked vegetables. Each one has its own objectively discernible point when it achieves its flavor and textural peak, asparagus different from artichoke, green bean different from potato. To undercook a vegetable is like arriving late to a movie; you get it, but you miss something. To overcook is to take the bright life right out of it; you taste the ghost of what you’ve murdered.

Season the water more aggressively than you would for pasta, and taste the water before you start boiling vegetables in it. Then cook and taste one vegetable before you add them all, to see if you have enough salt in the water. Allow for residual heat to be part of the cooking time — the vegetables continue to cook after you have removed them from the boiling water. And consider temperature itself a cooking technique. The difference between a rubbery, dull hard-boiled egg from the fridge and a tender, rich one that has cooled naturally is demonstration enough. You don’t want to bring the vegetables in from the sunny warm garden and then put them in a harsh refrigerator, and you don’t want to plunge or shock in an ice bath to stop the cooking. I also would make the mayonnaise the same day so it remains loose and silken and doesn’t risk becoming tight and stiff in the refrigerator; and I would not blanch the potatoes in advance, just to be able to pull these things out days later in a self-satisfied feat of back-to-school-back-to-work efficiency.

I think it makes a big delicious difference if you just cook, assemble, set out — neither hot nor cold — and eat. Right there on that porch you just so neatly swept.